A Dictionary of the Art of Printing

A Dictionary of the Art of Printing is the work of William Savage (1770–1843), a British printer and engraver. Opening his own printing business in 1803 in London, he made his reputation with Edward Foster's British Gallery of Engravings and invented a printing ink without oil.
The dictionary was compiled between 1822 and 1832, from notes gathered throughout his career. The edition on which this online version is based was published by Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, in London, 1841.

An exceptional reference, it offers a comprehensive account of the state of the printing industry in the United Kingdom in the first part of the nineteenth century. Savage touches upon all the aspects of the trade from technical to legal, and provides a few lively peeks into bustling workshops and the habits and customs of the workers. Here is a link to the full preface .

This online dictionary is still a work in progress: some entries may be missing, and some typos may still need to be taken care of…

The digitized version of A Dictionary of the Art of Printing used on this site, was scanned from an original copy kept at the Cornell University Library, and downloaded from The Internet Archive.
Although the text is Public Domain material in most countries, it is always advisable to check with the copyright laws in effect where you live, before using it in your projects.
The source code of this online dictionary, which includes the HTML markup in addition to the text, is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Any derivative work created from it must therefore be shared under the same conditions and include a reference to oldbookillustrations.com and a link to this page.